Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Ahoy! Welcome Prince

I'm just plain kicking myself for not taking better (or more) pictures of this craft project. What was I thinking? Just two decent pictures to show and only four pictures taken in all. And I'm so proud of this project. Today and, well, sometime soon I'm showing pictures of some crafts I created for a baby shower for a lovely lady from my church. Today I'm showing off the nautical theme flags. I see these sorts of stringed pennant flags in Pottery Barn kids catalogues (seriously, buy something from them once and you're on the list for years) and in Martha Stewart magazines and I was dieing to give them a try myself. Most of the flags you'll see are sewn. And I have a bit of a phobia about dusting off the sewing machine so I tried to think of how I could do pennants without using a sewing machine. And here's the recipe I came up with.I'm a huge fan of liquid starch. It's uses are limitless. I completely saturated the fabric (approximately 2 yards) with the sticky stuff and hung the fabric over my shower bar to dry overnight. And when dry, the seersucker was like paper. I was able to cut it with scissors for paper and paint on it with poster paints. I cut an isosceles triangle out of a box of Ritz Crackers, leaving two little inch long tabs along the top of the triangle to use to attach the flags to the rope. And here's a true essential for something like this -- I created a template for where and how large to place the letters so that the lettering was consistent from "W" to "O" and each letter in between. I used the same box of crackers to cut out a box for the letter and I made sure that each letter touched the top, bottom and sides of the box when it was placed over each flag.I used scrapbooking brads (cheap from the craft store) to attach the flags to the rope.This is something worth doing for a party because it provides some great craft bang for your buck. I should also mention that a trio of Command Adhesive hooks anchored the project to its walls and came off with no problems. This project cost around $13 in total:

Fabric -- $5 from the Harry Hines fabric outlets

Brads -- $3 for 80

Rope -- $2 from the hardware store

Liquid Starch -- $3 from any old grocery store, near the fabric softeners and detergents.

And from that I have plenty of starch and brads left. The compliments came pouring in as the guests arrived for the party.

About Me

In kindergarten, I got in trouble for making too many collages during our free time. The teacher called my mom and told her, "Hilary spends all her time making collages, but never spends time in the reading corner, or at the science station."
Well, now I read science journals for a living, but my true love in life continues to be visual arts. And my blog is about the fun ways I like to use cheaply-available products to make my home my own and brighten the lives of those around me.